The pain that serves

3. Confessions

I’ve been wanting to talk about pain even before this latest bout came on. The hurting, the desire, the longing and the quivering, and the escape. Life is pain, or so The Dread Pirate Roberts opined, but we’ve forgotten that lesson. After all, don’t I just want happiness, and isn’t happiness the absence of pain? Normal people will do anything to avoid pain, psychological or physical, or so I’ve been told. I’ve never met one of these normal people, but I think they’d probably do anything to avoid pain. Unlike me. What kind of person desires pain, courts it, feels alive when my body wishes most to die? But in pain I find a symphony: the individual voices appearing before willingly being consumed by the whole, the building tension, the crescendo, the release. This is my private joy, my song of the universe. Because maybe the universe is cold, is empty, is inert. But my pain, my singular precious, vibrates at the resonant frequency of the stars and the planets and the great works of humanity, and suddenly I know, in the space between my ribs and the muscles covering them and the organs which they protect and the blood rushing to heal a wound which is throbbing all the time, I know that God is here and I am her and there can be no greater ecstasy than this. 

Photo by Camila Quintero Franco on Unsplash

I had to learn to enjoy pain. I’m still learning. Not the inflicting of pain; I despise hurting other people. I don’t even like hurting myself. I don’t want to break my own bones, cut myself simply to feel something. No, not that kind of pain. But the pain of hard work, the pain mixed with accomplishment and just a touch of pride. The pain of being able to endure, of being able to push myself, of love and longing and desire. That pain I’m learning to love. I’m getting good at it too, and I can smile to myself in deception, knowing that while the rest of the world sees one of those normal people, I get to know the pleasure of deviance again. Sometimes the acts which I court aren’t about the records or aplomb (I’ve had plenty of that in this life), sometimes they’re about courting pain, like a lover desiring the forbidden love. Sometimes an action is an antidote to the boredom of everyday life. Sometimes its a personal challenge — how much can I endure. Other times it’s a method of transcendence, a beacon showing me I am not my body nor this pain but more. I can’t tell you why my pain is my desire; I can’t even tell myself what this is. But I can tell you it’s honest, more honest than any of the psychological theories and numbing pain killers which society pushes on it. In this tiny act of rebellion, I feel brave, get to heal the psychological pain of emptiness. Do you understand? I heal myself.

This bout is a sharp driving pain, just under my left pec, and a dull thud like two hammers pressing against my back. They’ve joined forces to wreak havoc on my insides this week. Not the first time, but I’d been pain free for long enough that I had forgotten. I had forgotten that a deep breath could send jolts of electricity to my toes and my head and everywhere in between, turning that breath rancid in my memory. I had forgotten what it felt like to wince involuntarily every time I coughed or sneezed. This time I sat gripping the steering wheel after class, fighting back the tears, guarding against the sobs that would rack my body if I let them and would only hurt me more, wondering if I was lucid enough to drive home, imagining how many Aleve I would need to make it through the night. It hijacked my brain and shut out everything else. No thoughts, no feelings, no desires, not even witty words to write; only pain. It’s horrible. It’s freeing. I want it to end. I need this.